Dr. Cyril Roux:

There are many questions. In the first half of the decade, prices were well below break-even. They moved sharply up so that they might be break-even today. To get a sustained decrease in premiums, you need a sustained decrease in claims and to get that decrease in claims, you need a number of strands and avenues. One is, as the Senator noted, fewer accidents, fewer claims and fewer fraudulent claims, while another is lower cost by claim. The incontrovertible fact is that claims must be paid by premiums and when you are in low-income or zero-interest-rate environment, there is no source to pay claims other than premiums.

We have the data we need to supervise and look after the solvency of these firms. The data we need as supervisors are sufficient. Why is that? It is because we are not a statistics office as a supervisor. We do not collect the data to give us answers. We collect data to enable us to ask questions. The spirit behind the data we collect is they will enable us and inform our supervisory engagement. With that, we go into firms, inspect, look at the IT and work alongside the firm to understand where it is coming from. We get other sources of data that are firm-specific. By themselves, the data do not speak. The data we collect are not for us to give the final view. All these actual data are always blurred. They are blurred either because you are looking at the accounts and then get the claims data from many different years all into the one place or because you try to look at the line of business and how things will develop. Here you need to do forecasts, look far into the future and make an educated judgment about the trends you can discern. You construct another blurred picture and mix all of that. On the fact that you are not getting clarity, nobody gets clarity. Carrying out supervision and getting a sense of where you want the firm to go is a complicated business. We have the data we need to conduct our supervision because we do not rely on them exclusively and we know that if there are some biases in the data of firm A or B, we know how to correct them silently and make them talk to other sources of evidence we have, so we have the information we need to execute our mandate in respect of solvency.